Summary

I set a meeting with Lacey Henderson on Oct 3. She didn’t show up, but I talked with her administrative assistance about a couple of questions I had. It was extremely helpful and positive, and answered some things we’d been wondering about as an officer team, as well as clearing up my idea of the reimbursement process.

Ironically, Lacey sent me a video just before the meeting that ended up answering a lot of my questions about the structure of org funding. I plan to make a document explaining the structure, for current officers and for posterity. It’s super confusing and it’s taken me this long to understand it. I feel like a document that is written from the perspective of an org officer might help us (and future officers) navigate the funding process.

Below are some questions that were answered in the meeting. Note that the questions and responses as formatted below are derived from the questions/answers that occurred during the meeting. They are my words, not the SOC’s. Please DM me if you have any other questions for the SOC, as they are fairly good at responding to email, and don’t despise in-person/online meetings to get things sorted out.

Q&A:

Can we reuse our deodorant funds? We previously allocated funds from the ECS Council variable funding pool to order custom sticks of deodorant to use as hackathon prizes for HackUTD IX. Unfortunately, the order was botched, and we had to return the sticks. The funds were transferred back into our account, and have just been sitting there.

While ECS Council policy dictates that “unused funds must be returned to the funding pool”, we are free to repurpose the funds allocated to use for deodorant. In general, we can use funds however we wish once they are allocated, but they will be reviewed by the SOC upon purchase/reimbursement.

What is the “Dean’s choice” funds in our account?

The Dean allocates some funds according to their own wishes every semester. This funding is out of our direct control to request, but we can lobby for it through a relationship with the Dean. It is free for us to use however we wish (barring SOC review, obviously).

Can we reimburse operational costs of Alumni? A lot of the old guard paid for Nebula’s operational costs out of pocket, and I would love to see them reimbursed, even though it’s been a while.

They would have to submit the reimbursement themselves. This is very strict—you cannot submit it for them. Once they have submitted it, it will be reviewed. Since it is a special case, it will likely go to the top. UTD will decide whether they can be reimbursed, or if too much time has passed.

Are we a “vendor” already, since we’ve had things reimbursed? Policy states you must be set up as a “vendor” with UTD before you may be reimbursed.

Each individual person who is reimbursed must be set up as a vendor. This process takes a while because there are onboarding activities. Once you are set up as a vendor, the reimbursement process doesn’t take as long.

Is there tax exemptions we can use for purchases?

UTD provides tax-exempt certificates that may be used to exempt purchases from taxes. It is unlikely that online purchases will accept these certificates, but in-person purchases usually do. For example, if you wanted to purchase donuts and coffee for an event, you could get out of sales tax using the tax-exempt form.

Can we reimburse Google Cloud Credits? We have decided to try reimbursement using GCP credits rather than individual bills aggregated at the end of the semester to reduce the overhead of reimbursement.

This is a valid form of reimbursement. It will go through the same review processes as any other operational cost reimbursement.

Conclusions

The biggest conclusions from this meeting, along with the strucutural clarity I got from the video, is that (1) funds in our account are ours to use as we wish once they have been allocated to us, and (2) we should try using GCP credits instead of regular billing.